“Occasionally I will leave behind a sentence that I know is missing a word, and I’ll go back to it later. I wrote a sentence like that yesterday. A man is talking about his wife, who’s a singer. She has just woken up in the morning, and he says, ‘Even half asleep like this, she sounded a true, dark note, a thrilling…’ I put in ‘cadence,’ but I know it’s not the right word—so the sentence is just sitting there, waiting for me to find the right, the exact, the only word.”